This is one of the greatest psychedelic-rock DVDs of East-Coast 1960s music yet to hit the market.
Yes, that's a pretty tight category. But the San Franciscan aristocrats of psychedelic rock, Jefferson Airplane, really defy such straitjacketing. They still stand as one of the strongest freshest, most musicianly of all US groups from the 1960s and 1970s. And vocalist extraordinaire Grace Slick still rules.
Here are video clips from various US shows tracing the Airplane's career through their first few albums -- their first album featuring vocalist Signe Anderson alongside Marty Balin, and then the pure gold of 'Surrealistic Pillow', when Anderson left the group, and was replaced by Grace Slick ("we had to choose", one of the band members commented, "between Grace or Janis Joplin -- Grace seemed more our style").
| "WE HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN GRACE OR JANIS JOPLIN...." |
Grace brought with her two of the group's biggest hits -- the pure Lewis Carroll trippery of 'White Rabbit' and the anthemic '(Do You Need) Somebody to Love'. Not till Annie Lennox was there a female vocalist combining such power and poetry and beauty -- and the fusion between her voice and Marty Balin's was consummate perfection.
There are 14 complete performances here, concluding with, from the 1990s, a Jorma Kaukonen guitar solo of 'Embryonic Journey'. He played this at the Airplane's induction into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. It sounds even better than in its first appearance on the 'Surrealistic Pillow' album.
The disc is structured to let the viewer watch a complete documentary, complete with some quite revelatory interviews with all the Airplane members (all members of the original line-up were still alive when the doco was made; drummer Spencer Dryden died soon after) and with other key figures of the day, including the designer of Airplane's trademark lightshows.
But you'll want to watch the documentary only once. For subsequent viewings, just select 'play performances' and all the documentary material is dropped, and we segue straight from one outstanding performance to another. It's a model of how such musical docos should be presented -- both in this feature, and in how the performances are presented complete and with no disgusting voice-overs.
The clips come from a variety of sources including film from the Monterey Pop Festival (the famous Pennebaker movie of that Festival is itself available as a great multi-disc set from the American label Criterion) and from television shows such as the Smothers Brothers show. There's even a clip, believe it or not, from the Perry Como Show!
Despite the varied sources, all the clips are presented about as well as you could expect to see such usually-ephemeral film of this vintage. Colours are nicely saturated; any flaws can easily be put down to just too much acid in the atmosphere.
The basic original mono or stereo sound has been 'extrapolated' into 5.1 Surround (that's the term on the DVD label).
It's a nice job. There are no wild excursions into Surround territory, but the sound comes up clear and strong.
It would have been a nice touch to have presented some of the tracks in their original mono -- I have CD editions of the first two Airplane albums in special editions which present all tracks in both their original mono and stereo mixes. And the mono versions are usually stronger, more complex and atmospheric than the stereo. In the Airplane's earliest days, most care was taken with the mono mix; stereo was just a faddish afterthought.......
This is a PAL DVD, and playing it in direct comparison with the US NTSC version shows that the 4 per cent lift in pitch when transferring to PAL is pretty pronounced. But it's not disturbing -- just noticeably higher-pitched if heard in comparison with the original NTSC version.
Jefferson Airplane was an aristocratic rock combo. Anyone interested in music from the far-off days of the greatest decade in rock 'n roll history should seek this out.
Rent it, buy it. Just get it.
